{"id":78970,"date":"2023-04-14T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T20:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=78970"},"modified":"2023-04-13T21:40:39","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T11:40:39","slug":"what-are-australias-options-in-a-taiwan-contingency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/what-are-australias-options-in-a-taiwan-contingency\/","title":{"rendered":"What are Australia\u2019s options in a Taiwan contingency?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, after visiting Taiwan\u2019s few remaining diplomatic allies in Latin America, made a \u2018stopover\u2019 last week in California, where she met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy<\/a>. Beijing responded with three days of military exercises<\/a>, encircling Taiwan with hundreds of aircraft and ships.<\/p>\n

It is another step forward in Beijing\u2019s long-term tactic of normalising a military presence around Taiwan through opportunistic, systematic escalation.\u00a0In Australia, this has come not long after the announcement of the details of Australia\u2019s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact, which Beijing vociferously denounced.<\/p>\n

These diplomatic and military activities have again focused the divisive national debate about relations with China on a question that\u2019s been posed for decades: would\u00a0Australia<\/a> join the US in a war against China over Taiwan?<\/p>\n

But Beijing\u2019s military exercises around Taiwan should also serve as a reminder that Australia\u2019s debate about China, the US and war involves a people we almost never hear from:\u00a0the Taiwanese.<\/p>\n

This is a very longstanding feature of Australia\u2019s foreign and defence\u00a0policy discourse. Leicester Webb, an august figure in the founding\u00a0of the Australian National University\u00a0who wrote the definitive account of the referendum to ban the Australian Communist Party,\u00a0Communism and democracy in Australia<\/em>, lamented in 1956 of Australia\u2019s<\/a> \u2018tendency to think of the island simply as a pawn in the global chess game which is the cold war and to envisage solutions of the Taiwan \u201cproblem\u201d which take account of everything except the actual situation on the island\u2019. Webb said that \u2018it\u00a0seems necessary to insist that its inhabitants are entitled to be put in the foreground of the picture\u2019.<\/p>\n

Webb would recognise\u00a0Australia\u2019s conversation today and might note that it hasn\u2019t moved forward much since the 1950s. What for him was a pawn in a global chess game has become today an underlying assumption that\u00a0Taiwan can be treated as a proxy for US power in the region, as a sign of America\u2019s waning primacy against a rising China.<\/p>\n

For so-called hawks<\/a>, this assumption makes for a very short\u00a0and straight line from Chinese military action against Taiwan to Australia joining the US in a war with China. For those on the other side<\/a>, it means that opposing the US alliance and opposing support for Taiwan\u2019s defence\u00a0are the same thing. The result is a very distorted debate that looks for truths not in the\u00a0current realities of regional security but in perennial questions about Australian identity.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, Taiwan is not just a proxy for US power.\u00a0It is a real place. The\u00a0war, if it comes, will be China\u2019s war against the Taiwanese. In the absence of any\u00a0viable\u00a0roadmap to achieve\u00a0the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s goal of \u2018unification\u2019,\u00a0war is the means through which Beijing\u00a0would\u00a0seek\u00a0to annex the island and remake Taiwanese society in Beijing\u2019s image.<\/p>\n

Rather than presenting a single choice about Australia\u2019s commitment to the US alliance, Beijing\u2019s Taiwan war would require a number of difficult, equivocal decisions. The direct economic consequences for Australia\u00a0would be severe: Taiwan was our fourth\u00a0largest export market in 2022<\/a> and is at the centre\u00a0of global technology supply chains<\/a>. But Australia would also have to decide whether to impose trade sanctions on China. We would face pressure from the US, Europe\u00a0and Japan to do so, but our joining in would come at great economic cost to us as well as China.<\/p>\n

Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese would flee the conflict and Australia would need to decide<\/a> how many to accept as political refugees. We would face pressure from the international community to accept many and from Beijing to accept none.<\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s war would affect\u00a0Australia through our relations with Japan, which has its own historical ties to Taiwan through its imperial history. It also prompts questions for Australia\u00a0about our position on Taiwan\u2019s\u00a0own defence\u00a0preparedness\u00a0and diplomatic isolation.<\/p>\n

And yes, in Beijing\u2019s war, Australia would also have to decide<\/a> whether to join the US in any military support for the Taiwanese in their defence\u00a0of their island. Without international support, the Taiwanese would lose. As Tsai\u2019s stopovers have shown, the US has a substantial policy and legal architecture with which it manages a close relationship with Taiwan, and its military involvement is probably inevitable.\u00a0But far from being a short, straight line for Australia, a strategic goal of Beijing\u2019s would be to keep Australia out\u00a0of its war\u00a0using military, political and economic means, all of which we would have to overcome\u00a0to be involved.<\/p>\n

If Beijing goes to war with the Taiwanese, it will cost Australia directly and dearly. The choice, then, is not about following along or not following along with the US. It is about whether we passively wait for Beijing to take that fateful action and try to bear its\u00a0economic and humanitarian costs\u00a0on us or whether we strengthen our means to act with power in the region in our interests. The government has presented a very expensive\u00a0and not unproblematic\u00a0plan\u00a0to establish\u00a0those means with the submarines to be delivered through AUKUS. There may be other, wiser, ones. But trying to isolate ourselves from Beijing\u2019s actions is not a choice available to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, after visiting Taiwan\u2019s few remaining diplomatic allies in Latin America, made a \u2018stopover\u2019 last week in California, where she met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Beijing responded with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":885,"featured_media":78972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,52,392,31,2406],"class_list":["post-78970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-taiwan","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat are Australia\u2019s options in a Taiwan contingency? | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/what-are-australias-options-in-a-taiwan-contingency\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What are Australia\u2019s options in a Taiwan contingency? | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, after visiting Taiwan\u2019s few remaining diplomatic allies in Latin America, made a \u2018stopover\u2019 last week in California, where she met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 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